Music Banter

Everyone knows who U2 are, right? Ageing stadium rockers, miniscule singer with a giant ego, god-botherers, sometimes a bit too keen on sticking their noses in where they don’t belong, more like a giant, world-straddling brand than a rock group? With Or Without You, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Live Aid, Mullets, good old Oirish boys who are proud of where they come from but outsourced their ridiculous wealth so their homeland gets no tax monies from all those album sales. Bono’s friends with Barak Obama, Bill Gates and the pope. He’s a dilettante and an egomaniac, a man who spends more time prancing about trying to save the world than he does no his music. That’s them, right? They’re horrendously unstylish, awkward in every way, lumpen, lumbering and just plain unsexy, the opposite of all good rock and roll, right? Most of all, of course, it’s that singer, that Bono. What a collossal ego, right? Wants you to believe he has the answers just because he’s up on that stage?

Nice Braces, Bono.

Wrong.

I’m going to take you back to my bedroom. Steady on, now.

I was fifteen. It was 1993, and I was a desparate, disaffected teenager, looking for an escape from a drab and desperately sad reality that I could hardly even talk about, much less come to terms with. Most important, like teenagers everywhere, I wanted- something other. Something to lift me up. Something to transcend the mundane.

And then I found it. I found it in a strange, subversive and endlessly obscure band who I loved, whose music took me to places I’d never been, who seemed to speak to me alone in my room. Listening to this strange band seemed to open up new possibilities, draw the curtain back on new worlds.

I’d discovered music a while back, when Meat Loaf and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had been supplanted at the top of the UK charts by a wild, unsettling chunk of distorted guitar, sleazed-up vocals and pounding rhythms which were unlike anything else, but now this band were touring the world. Strange reports were on Radio 1 every day of increasingly bizarre scenes at their shows, giant screens full of deconstructionist slogans, papier mache models of the band dancing in the crowd, a singer dressed as the Devil singing songs about selling your soul whilst giant TV screens displayed the slogan ‘Everything You Know Is Wrong.’ It was dizzying, it was exciting, and I wanted a part of it.

This is the band that made that sound:

And this was their singer:

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that is not a man who is unaware of how he comes across. It sure likes interesting, don’t you think?

I certainly did. So I went out and bought the band’s new album. The first album I ever owned. ‘Zooropa.’ An absolute masterpiece and still, in my opinion, one of the greatest albums ever made. From the strange buzz of feedback and babbling voices chiming ‘What Do You Want?’ on the opening title track, through the slow, industrial rattle of ‘Numb’ to the sad romance of ‘Stay,’ the angry father/son confrontation of ‘Dirty Day’ and the world-weary voice of Jonny Cash singing about being a wanderer in a strange futuristic wilderness, and then a klaxon in the emptiness which chimes out unexpectedly after the last song, and then teminates in a sort of electronic sob, it’s a record that oozes strangeness, that absolutely throbs with the bizarre. I love every song on it, for completely different reasons, and as a whole it’s a wonderful, wonderful 51 minutes and 15 seconds of anyone’s life.

All through the record, Bono’s lyrics reflect ambiguity and confusion, a sense of having no direction, being utterly lost in a dizzying world, questioning everything, claiming that ‘uncertainty can be a guiding light’ as he views the modern landscape of slogans and disinformation around him, and finds it lacking. So what does he do? He chucks out a whirlwind of ad slogans, lyrics about lucid dreams, false promises and lies whilst dressed as the devil, and beaming pictures of lonely cosmonauts to stadiums full of people.

Here’s the ‘Numb’ Video, which I promise you is musically about as far away from your preconceived idea of U2 as you could ever get.

And here’s some live footage from then: First up, here’s ‘Lemon’- a sort of futuristic disco song about despair, futility, and the pointlessness of all our efforts- ‘a man builds a city/with banks and cathedral/he turns his money into light to look for her… these are the days when our work has come asunder’ and the redemptive moment at the heart of darkness- ‘midnight is where the day begins.’

Next we have With Or Without You, an old song off their Joshua Tree days, the kind of song that gets featured in montages in Friends, a safe song, which all of a sudden seems to have that little bit more Edge (see what I did there? Oh, never mind) to it when it’s a gold-suited Devil singing about giving your soul away. Oh, and whilst we’re about it, my god, that boy had a voice on him then:

The Zooropa show closer ‘Love Is Blindness’ off the preceding album ‘Achtung Baby,’ which segues into an absolutely ASTOUNDING version of Unchained Melody. If it doesn’t break your heart, then you are a cold and dead person, lying to yourself.

This is U2 as they were back then. My U2. Wild and ambiguous, four mad souls dancing at the heart of a gleaming, chaotic, contradictory whirlwind of glitter, gold and love, and keeping their heads about them whilst they did it. They were the best band in the world. The strangest band in the world. The most daring rock stars ever. The band that saved my life when I was fifteen and my mother died.

This is my U2. Zooropa is a classic album you thought was shit. Everything You Know is Wrong.